I have almost exactly the same as everyone else...

For me, it's exactly 7 days before my period starts, start getting intense, knife-stabbing-like pain in my lower right abdomen. It radiates into my back, it wakes me from a dead sleep, I feel like I'm going to throw up, it becomes the only thing I can think about. The older I get the worse it gets. Pain killers don't help. When the main flare (15 - 45 minutes) passes, there's a dull, bruised-feeling echo that can be helped with heat. It lasts for 4 - 6 days, it's every several hours, and I turn into a zombie from sleep deprivation over those days. On a really bad day recently, it was every 1 - 2 hours all day and night. My notes from that day read "Late in the day, bad pain. Overnight, sometimes just an hour between bad flares. Bad echoes. No relief."

Like many of you it took me a little while to put the pieces together. A tracking app helped a lot because I used to feel the pain at work or something and I would go in and mark my period as started (I would sometimes get small twinges to start the day and put in a menstrual cup in preparation so the lack of bleeding wasn't strange until I'd get home and clean the cup), and then later be confused when it hadn't. Through this, eventually I saw the 7 day out pattern. After that, a while longer before I put it together with digestive issues. I finally realized that the pain would resolve fairly quickly after a bowel movement, but as to why there was pain the first place, still a complete mystery.

I began to suspect endometriosis and finally some desperate googling got me to the website of Pacific Endometriosis. I can't link it because I just joined to add onto this thread, but if you google "Pacific Endometriosis bowel disease" you will find a very helpful article about this. I almost started crying reading a medical professional describe what I was going through. The way many of you have described your pain I suspect it's something similar.

I still haven't been able to find any way to treat it, unfortunately, though I do have a doctor who is willing to do a surgical procedure to look for and remove growth on my bowel if it's there. But having an idea of what is causing the pain helped me a lot.